This is just so wrong on so many levels, it’s hard even to know where to begin. In the first place, it’s just incredibly insulting to an awful lot of brilliant, hard-working, and highly accomplished people out there who have soared to the top of non-STEM academic disciplines and through a combination of talent, hard work, and “getup and go” have achieved enormous professional success. The idea that “getup and go” is confined to STEM fields reflects, IMO, an extremely narrow, shallow, and distorted understanding of what makes the world tick.
I can see how from the perspective a STEM major it might appear that way, however. Many STEM majors have extremely limited exposure to the humanities and social sciences, and the exposure they do have tends to distort their impressions of those fields. More or less universal among STEM majors is the need to satisfactorily complete some “gen ed” requirements—i.e., they need to earn some social science and humanities credits. Almost to a person they do this by taking the easiest, baby-level introductory courses, which they are steered toward either by their academic advisers or by student lore recommending the “gut” courses that will most easily satisfy their gen ed requirements. They generally find these courses not very challenging, and so they erroneously leap to the conclusion that the entire field is “easy.” But this is the equivalent of social science or humanities majors satisfying their natural science requirements by taking the classic “physics for poets” or “rocks for jocks” course, and concluding that STEM majors must be “easy.” In either case, it’s just not a representative sample. Granted, there’s not perfect equivalency; “weed-out” intro-level courses are much more common in math and science, simply because more students aspire to be medical doctors or engineers than most schools can accommodate. Most social science and humanities disciplines, in contrast, are looking to entice students into the major at the introductory level, rather than to turn away a certain percentage. So it may be true that (apart from the baby science courses specifically designed for non-STEM majors, offered as a courtesy by science departments) intro-level math and science courses tend to be more difficult, and are graded on a more unforgiving scale, than intro-level humanities and social science courses. But to leap from there to the conclusion that at more advanced levels the non-STEM majors must also be “easy” is an unjustifiable inductive inference. Anyone familiar with the rudiments of the scientific method ought to be able to recognize that.
The second distorting exposure to non-STEM majors that many STEM majors have is the one described by zinhead. A certain fraction of their peers, would-be engineers and medical doctors, end up bailing out of engineering or pre-med studies and migrating to non-STEM majors, and the movement in that direction is generally much stronger than movement in the opposite direction, from non-STEM to STEM majors. But there are many reasons for this; it’s not all lack of “getup and go.” Some of the bail-outs find that despite ample desire and effort, they just don’t have as much aptitude for math and science as they expected going in. That doesn’t mean they lack “getup and go” or academic talent; it just means there was a mismatch between their particular talents and the field they initially chose, often pushed into that initial choice by parents or other influential adults who wanted to steer them toward a “practical” major. Second, some of the STEM bailouts simply find the work in their STEM courses less interesting, less satisfying, and less intellectually engaging than they expected, and less of all those things than the work they find themselves doing in non-STEM courses. Again, this doesn’t reflect lack of “getup and go” or academic talent; it just means that when a richer array of options is on the table, the initially chosen STEM field becomes less attractive. The students in this group may actually be doing very well in their STEM studies, but they find the actual work to be . . . well, just more boring and pedestrian than they expected. Third, it’s no doubt true that some people bail out of STEM majors because they lack the.“getup and go” to successfully complete the major. But to assume this means that non-STEM majors are therefore overpopulated with people lacking “getup and go” is another huge inductive fallacy. In fact, at most schools, most students aren’t and never have been STEM majors, and most non-STEM majors start out as non-STEM majors. The relatively small fraction who bail out of STEM majors because they just don’t want to work hard are also extremely unlikely to rise to the top of their non-STEM field as well, because they’ll be competing against people who have a genuine talent for and interest in the field, and the “getup and go” to rise to the highest levels in it. .
